Broadcom BCM4306 + FC5

Back during COMDEX Las Vegas in 2002, Broadcom had shipped the industry's first 54Mb/s 2.4GHz wireless LAN solution, which was named the BCM4306. This 802.11g/b BCM4306 solution was accompanied by the BCM4309 dual-band, BCM2050, and BCM4702. While we haven't had much in the way of problems with some Linux distributions -- specifically Debian-based distros -- some others haven't faired quite as well with out-of-the-box support. The Broadcom BCM4306 solution that we have been using is PCI based and came from Minitar with a model number of MN54GPC. With a bit of tweaking, we have had no troubles getting the Minitar MN54GPC (BCM4306) working with Fedora Core 5 and the 2.6.16-1.2080_FC5 kernel.

While the Broadcom BCM4306 Linux support isn't comparable to the magnificent open-source capabilities with the Atheros 802.11g Chipsets and the use of MadWifi, the BCM4306 does have some Linux drivers available. The open-source Broadcom 43xx Linux driver is quite experimental as Broadcom has yet to publicly release the specifications for their WiFi chips. We had attempted to use these BC43XX drivers with the Minitar MN54GPC, however, the module would fail to work in our tests. We had used the bcm43xx-fwcutter RPM from the official Fedora 5 Extras repository, and had extracted the card's firmware out of the Windows wireless drivers. In fact, we had tried cutting multiple Windows drivers to attain the firmware but in all instances in combination with the Linux BCM43XX drivers, the card had failed to work. Below is an example of the bcm43xx-fwcutter at work.

The alternate option (which ultimately worked) was using ndiswrapper. After building ndiswrapper on Fedora Core 5, we simply had installed the Windows Broadcom display drivers (bcmwl5/bcmwl5a) following by creating a network-script entry for wlan0, and then loading the ndiswrapper module. With those steps (among a few other tweaks) accomplished, the Minitar MN54GPC (BCM4306) had no problems running under Fedora Core 5 with the 2.6.16 kernel. One little issue that we had faced though, was while running NetworkManager, we had experienced some connection issues with one of our wireless networks.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.